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Farmer and Forager Interactions in Southeast Asia

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Abstract

Archaeological studies of foragers in Southeast Asia have overwhelmingly focused on technologies and economies in the pre-Neolithic social landscapes of ‘pure’ foragers of the late Pleistocene or early Holocene. However, there is a growing interest in integrating foragers into archaeological research on the complex social and economic mosaics of early agricultural societies during the Neolithic and Early Metal Age periods, raising significant issues about forager/farmer dichotomies and the nature of traditional models of ‘Austronesian’ expansion. With the advantage of historical and ethnographic sources, there is also a recent expansion of archaeological studies focused on specialized forager forest collectors integrated into the political economies of early historic maritime trading polities like Srivijaya, Kedah, Khmer, the Cham states, and Philippine chiefdoms that were dependent on these groups for export products in the lucrative South China Sea/Indian Ocean trade networks of the late first millennium to mid-second millennium. Archaeological investigations of Southeast Asian foragers in these recent complex social landscapes require regional inquiries that include open settlement sites as well as cave excavations, and techniques of archaeological recovery that address the challenging issues of site visibility and preservation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Chicago, M/C027, 2012 BSB, 1007 W. Harrison, Chicago, IL, 60607-7139, USA

    Laura Lee Junker & Larissa M. Smith

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  1. Laura Lee Junker
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  2. Larissa M. Smith
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Correspondence to Laura Lee Junker .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA

    Junko Habu

  2. Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

    Peter V. Lape

  3. School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA

    John W. Olsen

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Junker, L.L., Smith, L.M. (2017). Farmer and Forager Interactions in Southeast Asia. In: Habu, J., Lape, P., Olsen, J. (eds) Handbook of East and Southeast Asian Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6521-2_36

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